Apple gives the MacBook and MacBook Pros a Kaby Lake refresh

Apple modernizes its laptops in a rare WWDC hardware update.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is usually all about software, but every once in a while it brings some hardware along with it, too. Today, Apple provided a minor but wide-ranging refresh to its modern MacBooks and MacBook Pros by adding new processors from Intel and making a handful of other tweaks.

Further Reading

The new processors are from Intel’s “Kaby Lake” family, and some of them have been available for the better part of a year. Compared to the outgoing Skylake architecture, Kaby Lake introduces a gently tweaked version of Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, provides small boosts to CPU clock speeds, and supports native acceleration for decoding and encoding some kinds of 4K video streams.

The 12-inch MacBook, last updated in April of 2016, stands to benefit the most. The low-power Y-series chips the MacBook uses see the biggest performance boost from the Kaby Lake upgrade, and Apple has also added the refined butterfly switch keyboard introduced in the MacBook Pros last year. The keyboards both have the same layout and offer the same amount of key travel, but the newer version of the keyboard has a slightly more satisfying feel. The new MacBook will also get a faster SSD.

The Kaby Lake chips make less of a difference in the new MacBook Pro, which was updated just eight months ago after a year-and-a-half or so of neglect. It’s a fast turnaround, which means there are few differences between the new 2017 versions and their predecessors. As before, the 13-inch models use dual-core CPUs and integrated GPUs across the lineup, while the 15-inch versions include quad-core CPUs and dedicated AMD GPUs that can be used to push multiple 5K displays at once. The new 15-inch models will have faster GPUs.

The 13-inch versions come with Intel’s “Iris Plus” GPUs, which are pretty similar to Skylake’s Iris GPUs, aside from the new “Plus” branding. They still include a performance-boosting 64MB of eDRAM, which gives them a big leg up compared to MacBook Pros from 2015 and earlier.

MacBook prices start at $1,299 while the non-Touch Bar version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro will also start at $1,299. The MacBook Pro 13-inch laptop with a Touch Bar will start at $1,799, while the 15-inch version will start at $2,399.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites